VOLUME 8, ISSUE 3
Library Newsletter
ST JOHN’S COLLEGE Easter 2025
The lost art of minute writing Clubs and societies are such an essential part of student life that a College Archive without records of student societies would feel quite lifeless. Minutes, in particular, give a flavour of the people and the time – especially when they’re written, in a sense, for the fun of it (as well as with an eye to posterity).
stopped at 10.45 and after a few minutes oneor two of the members retired to bed. The remainder, as on a previous occasion, played musical instruments. But even the the worst things must come to an end, and this nightmare terminated at 11.15, after which (as has already been stated) all was peace.”
A lovely example, which is so of its time it couldn’t be mistaken for any other decade, is found in the records kept by St John’s cricketers who, it turns out, were busy on two fronts. One, naturally enough, was playing cricket. The other was participating in ‘The Crickets’, a play- and book-reading society and dining club, whose members were also in the Cricket Club. The Crickets held weekly meetings in the Michaelmas and Lent Terms, and apparently strove to make their minutes as light-hearted as their reading material. P.E.M. Mellor, in 1925, could well have been channelling P.G. Wodehouse: “Reading
The minutes of student societies rarely find their way to the Archives now, which is a pity. Perhaps, to encourage the practice, there is an opportunity for the Archives to run a competition for the ‘best’ society minutes written over the course of a year (prize to be decided)? Philip Mellor was a member of the Football as well as the Cricket Club and the Cricketers, and clearly made the most of his time at St John’s. It was sobering, on looking him up in the Register of Twentieth-Century Johnians, to find that he was killed in action in 1943. Lynsey Darby, Archivist